Friday, March 6, 2009

I meant to post about this Wed night. I finally finished Circe's Recruits: Hale!!! Yippeee! Now I have to go through it several more times before handing it off to my editor. I edit as I go, so extreme edits aren't necessary, just the usual spelling, grammatical stuff.

I know some authors never look back until the end. So their first draft could be totally different from the final 5th or 6th draft. Not so with me. Let's say I write 10 pages a day. Before I can write again the next day, I have to first review those previous 10 pages (only the work I just wrote, not the entire story beforehand). Letting the work sit makes it easier to go through and spot consistency and grammatical errors, at least for me. Then I go through a quarterly editing process, where I'll edit the work when I think I have at least 1/4 of it done. Even if the entire novel isn't finished, I have to look back at it as a whole, as much as the book is written. I then write some more. I do it again at the half point and 3/4 point mark.

Once I push through to the end, I let the book sit. Normally I'd give it a few days, but I really want to shoot this to my editor since I took a long time putting it together. Maybe because I edited too much before it was done! Anyway, now the sucker is finished. A few more read throughs and it's off and out of my hands. Good-bye Circe's Recruits, or should I say adieu, in the off chance my editor likes my idea for a loosely related story about another group of Circs?Ah, who knows?